"Meretricious" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... things than that, and because of my vision, because of my vision and for no other reason I am the most ridiculous of men. Always I have tried to go out from myself to the world and give. Those early books of mine, those meretricious books in which I pretended all was so well with the world,—I did them because I wanted to give happiness and contentment and to be happy in the giving. And all the watchers and the grippers, the strong silent men and the calculating ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... martyrs, holy families,—can art have been leashed through so many ages with a pleasant fiction? Is there not somewhere at bottom an earnest, vital truth, which men must needs cling by if they be healthful and earnest themselves? Even the meretricious adornments of the churches of Genoa afford new evidence of the way in which the heart of a people has lavished itself upon belief; and if belief, why, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 103, May, 1866 • Various
... malefactors were preached at when sentenced, and after condemnation were made public examples—were brought into church and made the subject of discourse and even of objurgation from the pulpit. Judge Sewall frequently refers to this meretricious custom. Under date March 11, 1685, he says: "Persons crowd much into the old Meeting House by reason of James Morgan (who was a condemned murderer) and a very exciting and riotous scene took place." This was at a Thursday lecture, and in the gloomy winter ...
— Customs and Fashions in Old New England • Alice Morse Earle
... wealth and dignity, and providing for the greatness of his house, and, as often happens in such marriages, he forgot to ask for a certificate of character, forgot to ask what sort of mother he was providing for his children. She came with all her meretricious splendour covering one of the most fiendish natures that ever wore a woman's form. She developed, if she did not bring with her, all imaginable vices—her vindictive passion revelled in blood; her religion was the filthiest ...
— Men of the Bible; Some Lesser-Known Characters • George Milligan, J. G. Greenhough, Alfred Rowland, Walter F.
... closed, except in the early morning, and visitors are admitted by the custode on ringing a door bell under the portico. The interior is dark and solemn, with much less gilding and meretricious ornament than is usual in Roman churches. It contains, in the side chapels, many objects of interest; frescoes and altar-pieces by Annibale Caracci, Pinturicchio, and Peruzzi; and splendid sepulchral monuments. Of the last the most conspicuous are the marble tomb of Alessandro Guidi, the Italian ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... one else. There was no other like it in any of the stores, and she had turned all of them inside out. It was a platinum fob chain, simple and chaste in design, properly proclaiming its value by substance and not by meretricious ornamentation—as all good things should do. It was even worthy ...
— Americans All - Stories of American Life of To-Day • Various
... to form the general whole, the first and last aim of every other painter, D. Maclise, R.A., has most gallantly disregarded. If there be effect, it certainly is not in the right place, or rather there is no concentration of effect; it possesses the glare of a coloured print, and that too of a meretricious sort—incidents there are, but no plot—less effect upon the animate than the inanimate. The toilet-table takes precedence of the lady—the couch before the sleeper—the shadow, in fact, before the substance; and as it is a sure mark of a vulgar mind to dwell ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, September 12, 1841 • Various
... believed that he lived in constant fear of such discovery, and as it was, his dependence on a little scamp like his son's friend was a sore humiliation to one who had naturally supposed hitherto that any knowledge he had not happened to acquire could only be meretricious and useless. ...
— Vice Versa - or A Lesson to Fathers • F. Anstey
... dependent upon its predecessor and each simple in itself. If, after doing so, one simply knocks out all the central inferences and presents one's audience with the starting-point and the conclusion, one may produce a startling, though possibly a meretricious, effect. Now, it was not really difficult, by an inspection of the groove between your left forefinger and thumb, to feel sure that you did NOT propose to invest your small capital in ...
— The Return of Sherlock Holmes • Arthur Conan Doyle
... glass which now looked at her was too determined, too hard. It startled her. And she changed the expression on it. But then it looked insincere, meretricious, affected, and always haggard. ...
— The Way of Ambition • Robert Hichens
... historians who were unable to distinguish history from poetry. "What!" he exclaims, "bedizen history like her sister? As well take some mighty athlete with muscles of steel, rig him up with purple drapery and meretricious ornament, rouge and powder his cheeks; faugh, what an object one would make of him with such defilements!"[105] But meretricious ornament was popular, and poets, historians, and orators alike scrambled to see who could most adorn his speech. Quintilian's pleas for the purer taste of a ...
— Rhetoric and Poetry in the Renaissance - A Study of Rhetorical Terms in English Renaissance Literary Criticism • Donald Lemen Clark
... justness and aptitude of sentiment, and in an air of majesty (162) pervading the whole composition, this author may be regarded as one of the best models extant of historical narrative. His style is splendid without meretricious ornament, and copious without being redundant; a fluency to which Quintilian gives the expressive appellation of "lactea ubertas." Amongst the beauties which we admire in his writings, besides the animated speeches frequently interspersed, ...
— The Lives Of The Twelve Caesars, Complete - To Which Are Added, His Lives Of The Grammarians, Rhetoricians, And Poets • C. Suetonius Tranquillus
... miserable succession of errors resulting from the meretricious atomic remedy adopted by the ether to cure its local sores, it must first be said of the ether itself that there is too much of it. Space is not sufficient for it. Thus, the particles of ether—those imponderable entities which vibrate through a block of marble or a disc of hammered steel with ...
— The Crack of Doom • Robert Cromie
... the direction of dramatic representations at our metropolitan theatres. Immense is the influence of lofty and ennobling dramatic pieces when supported by able and impassioned actors. As deleterious is the sway of questionable or immoral pieces when decked out in the meretricious garb of fancy, or aided by the transient attractions of beauty. Who can tell how much the heart-stirring appeals of Shakspeare have done to string to lofty purposes the British heart; how powerfully the dignified sentiments of Corneille have ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 363, January, 1846 • Various
... spurious, supposititious, so-called, pretended, feigned, trumped up, bogus, scamped, fraudulent, tricky, factitious;bastard; surreptitious, illegitimate, contraband, adulterated, sophisticated; unsound, rotten at the core; colorable; disguised; meretricious, tinsel, pinchbeck, plated; catchpenny; Brummagem. artificial, synthetic, ersatz[&German]; simulated &c 544. Adv. under false colors, under the garb of, under cover of; over the left. Phr. "keep the word of promise to the ear ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... and that a consummate work is a sort of hotch-potch of the pure and the impure, the graceful and the grotesque. Its prime duty is to amuse, to puzzle, to fascinate, to savor of a complex imagination. Gloriani's statues were florid and meretricious; they looked like magnified goldsmith's work. They were extremely elegant, but they had no charm for Rowland. He never bought one, but Gloriani was such an honest fellow, and withal was so deluged with orders, that this ...
— Roderick Hudson • Henry James
... that had rouge been used it would have inevitably been detected; but the island damsels trusted to their good figures and features, and their lively manners and conversation, rather than to any meretricious charms, to win admiration. Stella was generally considered the most charming of the maidens present, as undoubtedly she was the most blooming, and she seemed to enjoy the ball as much as any one. She danced ...
— The Three Lieutenants • W.H.G. Kingston
... time they reached Sydney, into a serious affair, and had been the determining cause why he had not written even to George. Godfrey Radmore had not thought of that woman for years. But to-night her now hateful, meretricious image rose, with horrid vividness, before him. It had been an ugly, debasing episode, and had dragged on and on, as such episodes have a way ...
— What Timmy Did • Marie Adelaide Belloc Lowndes
... is particularly conclusive on this point. Throughout the 'Augustan' era, mythology was approached as a mere treasure-house of pleasant fancies, artificial decorations, 'motives', whether sumptuous or meretricious. Allusions to Jove and Venus, Mercury, Apollo, or Bacchus, are of course found in every other page of Dryden, Pope, Prior, Swift, Gay, and Parnell. But no fresh presentation, no loving interpretation, of the old myths occur anywhere. The immortal stories were then part and parcel ...
— Proserpine and Midas • Mary Shelley
... excellent true! How I thank thee, great Times, For teaching that phrase! 'Tis delicious! Fiction! The haunt of mad follies, crass crimes, Fads futile, and tastes meretricious. Oh, joy, to transport to that Limbo of Fools, Upon trial and honest conviction, The plagues of our Parties, our Churches, our Schools, Who ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, December 5, 1891 • Various
... grande nation. It is this same taste, which, in that solemn commemoration of the death of their king, the service solennel for Louis XVI. contrived to introduce a species of affected parade,—a detailed and theatrical sort of grief,—a kind of meretricious mummery of sorrow, which banished all the feelings, and almost completely destroyed the impression which such a scene in any other country would inevitably have produced. Any thing, it may be easily imagined, which gratifies ...
— Travels in France during the years 1814-1815 • Archibald Alison
... lesser clergy, were greatly appreciated. Some of the furniture did not wholly commend itself to Rosamund. There were certain settees and back-to-backs, certain whatnots and occasional tables, which seemed to stamp the character of the Dean's widow as meretricious. But these could easily be "managed." Rosamund was enchanted with the house, and went from room to room with Canon Wilton radiantly curious, and almost as excited as ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... a promise, an enigmatical promise flashed up the river reach in letters of fire. London was indeed very beautiful that night. Without hope she would have seemed not only as beautiful but as terrible as a black panther crouching on her prey. Our hope redeemed her. Beyond her dark and meretricious splendours, beyond her throned presence jewelled with links and points and cressets of fire, crowned with stars, robed in the night, hiding cruelties, I caught a moment's vision of the coming City of Mankind, of a city more wonderful than all my dreaming, full of life, full ...
— New Worlds For Old - A Plain Account of Modern Socialism • Herbert George Wells
... more expressively. Dick says in "The Light That Failed" that an old device for an unskilful artist is to stick a superfluous bunch of flowers somewhere in a picture where it will cover up bad drawing. I'm afraid writers are apt to use stock phrases in the same meretricious fashion. ...
— Greenwich Village • Anna Alice Chapin
... surely had been made for Jim and no one else. There was no other like it in any of the stores, and she had turned all of them inside out. It was a platinum fob chain, simple and chaste in design, properly proclaiming its value by substance alone and not by meretricious ornamentation—as all good things should do. It was even worthy of The Watch. As soon as she saw it she knew that it must be Jim's. It was like him. Quietness and value—the description applied to both. Twenty-one dollars they took from her for it, and ...
— Short Stories of Various Types • Various
... lived in these days perhaps both the artist and the philosopher had been poets. But (with regard to the latter) at that time poetry was not the customary vent for deep thought or passionate feeling. Gray, it is true, though unjustly condemned as artificial and meretricious in his style, had infused into the scanty works which he has bequeathed to immortality a pathos and a richness foreign to the literature of the age; and, subsequently, Goldsmith, in the affecting yet somewhat enervate ...
— The Disowned, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... portals of the Golden Gate Hotel. He had been already told that the doom of that palatial edifice was sealed by the laying of the cornerstone of a new erection in the next square that should utterly eclipse it; he even fancied that it had already lost its freshness, and its meretricious glitter had been tarnished. But when he had ordered his breakfast he made his way to the public parlor, happily deserted at that early hour. It was here that he had first seen her. She was standing there, by that mirror, when their eyes first met in a sudden instinctive ...
— A Ward of the Golden Gate • Bret Harte
... old medicament, Whose fusty vials have long dried impotent, Why prop ye meretricious things, Denounce the sane as vicious things, And call outworn factitious ...
— Late Lyrics and Earlier • Thomas Hardy
... forming any contract at all: they do not put asunder those who are joined together, but they previously hinder the junction. And, if any persons under these legal incapacities come together, it is a meretricious, and not ...
— Commentaries on the Laws of England - Book the First • William Blackstone
... necessary for him to invent a style which should be capable of sustained and lofty dignity, which should be ornate enough to maintain the interest of the reader and charm him and at the same time not so ornate as to give an air of meretricious decoration to what was largely and simply conceived. Particularly it was necessary for him to avoid those incursions of vulgar associations which words carelessly used will bring in their train. He succeeded brilliantly in this difficult ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair
... in the pursuit of arms, and loving his mother with all the force of his great nature, the man had cared little for other women, turning with scorn from the meretricious charms of those he encountered in camp or among his comrades, and finding no time or inclination to seek others, so that except for the light fancies of an hour, or the calm affection for his cousin Barbara, whom he found ...
— Standish of Standish - A story of the Pilgrims • Jane G. Austin
... philosopher, 'that I never enter a church, but the man in the pulpit talks so unlike a man, as though he had never known what human joys or sorrows are—so carefully avoids every subject of interest save one, and paints that in colours at once so misty and so meretricious—that I say to myself, I will never sit under him again.' This may, of course, be only an ingenious excuse of his for not going to church; but there is really something in it. The angels, with their harps, on clouds, are now presented to the eyes, ...
— Some Private Views • James Payn
... correggiosity was at times overpowering. His vocabulary overcame him often, bore him away from his thought and landed him in some swamp out of which he was wont to extricate himself, to the great delight of the semi-educated reader by some quip or quirk equally meretricious and mephitic. Thus would he, metaphorically, throw filth at himself. He felt all the time that he was pursuing the best course, bending things he despised and loathed to better purposes. Mr. Brann believed that the country was, if not ...
— Volume 12 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... the public gaze, of its darkest ingredients, and dressed up, in their theological works, in false and meretricious pretentions to truth and purity, it exhibited a dogma only calculated to exert a beneficial influence on mankind, and to prove a source of morality and usefulness. But oh, as with all ideals, how unlike was ...
— The Priest, The Woman And The Confessional • Father Chiniquy
... pointed out to me in which the gallant old sailor died; a plain, old-fashioned piece of furniture, without any gilding or meretricious adornment, and honest and ...
— Crown and Anchor - Under the Pen'ant • John Conroy Hutcheson
... the chamber of the Paulownia for their use. These performers, whatever their origin, received the treatment of samurai, and their dainty posturing in the dance became a model for the lords of the Bakufu Court, so that the simple demeanour of military canons was replaced by a mincing and meretricious mien. Another favourite dance in Yedo Castle was the furyu. A book of the period describes the latter performance in these terms: "Sixteen youths made their appearance; they all wore wide-sleeved robes and purple figured silk with embroidery of oak leaves in gold and silver ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... some importance in its relations to society and to the individual. It is always indicative of the temper of the time. This is notably true of the wanton ease of the costume of Charles the Second, and the meretricious artificiality of that of the middle of the last century. And in the deliberate double-skirted costliness of the female fashions of our own day,—fashions not intended for courts or wealthy aristocracies, but for everybody,—contrasted as they are with ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... and the devout intuition of psalmists, we have the praise of Wisdom. But that noble portrait is no copy of the Greek conception, but contains features peculiar to itself. She stands opposed to blatant, meretricious Folly, and seeks to draw men to herself by lofty motives and offering pure delights. She is not a person, but she is a personification of an aspect of the divine nature, and seeing that she is held forth as willing to bestow herself on men, that queenly figure shadows the great ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... estates of her maternal grandfather, Robert Child, Esq., of Osterly Park, Middlesex. A small full-length portrait of this great beauty of George IV.'s court, painted by Lawrence in his elegant but meretricious manner, hangs in the first-floor room of the old bank. The last Child died early in this century. A descendant of Addison is a member of the present firm. In Chapter 1., Book I., of his "Tale of Two Cities," Dickens has sketched ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... something meretricious and cheap in the use of material and subjects that lie warm against the very secret heart of nature. The mystery of love and the sanctity of death are to be used by writers and artists only in their ennobling aspect of results. A certain class of French writers have sickened ...
— The Delicious Vice • Young E. Allison
... taste, independently of historical diversities, sculpture presents every degree of the meretricious, the grotesque, and the beautiful,—more emphatically, because more palpably, than is observable in painting. The inimitable Grecian standard is an immortal precedent; the Medival carvings embody the rude Teutonic truthfulness; where Canova provoked comparison with the antique, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... a certain meretricious beauty," I admitted. "Those red cushions and all that bright metal work give ...
— The Princess Passes • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson
... that promotion in the U.S. services will be based solely on fitness, without regard to seniority. These are the sort of revolutionists who would cover up grave defects in army organisation by the meretricious expedient of ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, October 31, 1917 • Various
... went through a course of instruction with a local teacher of music, who, scenting talent, dismissed preliminaries with the assurance of his kind, and initiated his pupil into all that is false and meretricious in the literature of the piano—the cheaply pathetic, the tinsel of transcription, the titillating melancholy of Slavonic dance-music—to leave him, but for an increased agility of finger, not a whit further forward than he had found him. ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... instructing the Italians was not thrown away. False liberty was already strewing their path with its meretricious allurements. "As true liberty diffuses around it peace and grace and calm, so does false liberty disseminate, wherever it is implanted, terror, dismay and horror. The brows of one are illuminated with the splendid halo of order, and those of the ...
— Pius IX. And His Time • The Rev. AEneas MacDonell
... external aids to spiritual worship, and that few things more weaken the power of the Gospel that Paul preached than the lowering of the flag in conformity with desires of men of sense, and substituting for the simple glory of the preached Word the meretricious, and in time impotent, and always corrupting, attractions ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: Romans Corinthians (To II Corinthians, Chap. V) • Alexander Maclaren
... the earnestness and variety of the Scripture a word about the simplicity of its literary expression. There is nothing meretricious in its style. There is no effort to say a thing finely. The translators have avoided all temptation to grow dramatic in reproducing the original. Contrast the actual English Bible with the narratives or other literary works that have been built up out of it. Read all that the Bible tells ...
— The Greatest English Classic A Study of the King James Version of • Cleland Boyd McAfee
... entire essay should be read, for it contains a study of the Joshua in which this most delicious of English prose writers speaks of the "wise falsifications" of the great masters. Before his death the critics, tiring of him sooner than the public, called Martin tricky, meretricious, mechanical. To be sure, his drawing is faulty, his colour hot and smoky; nevertheless, he was not a charlatan. As David Wilkie wrote: "Weak in all these points in which he can be compared to other artists," he had the compensating quality ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... emotions to be conveyed. Who can tell what would be the effect of such a church music? What a feeling of earnestness and sincerity would it not lend to services now often marred by the shallowness or meretricious glitter of their musical portions? The range is wide, the field broad; there is scope for grandeur, sublimity, power, jubilation, the brightest strains of extatic joy, mourning, pathos, and the passionate pleading ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 6, No. 1, July, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... province or people, and that acquiescence in her wishes would be for him an unrighteous abuse of his function. We know a conscientious artist on the organ who would no more perjure his instrument than his lips, but go to the stake sooner than turn his keys into tongues to captivate a meretricious taste or transform one breath of the air under his fingers into sympathetic lying, though thousands should be ready to resound their delight. So was it with the noble Christian Jew, an Israelite of harmony indeed. The most sympathetic of vocations, whose appeal more than any other is ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 74, December, 1863 • Various
... as I say, is not external, but internal. It lies in the same disconcerting apprehension of the larger realities, the same impatience with the paltry and meretricious, the same disqualification for mechanical routine and empty technic which one finds in the higher varieties of men. Even in the pursuits which, by the custom of Christendom, are especially their own, women seldom show any of that elaborately conventionalized and half ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... comprehension of a sympathetic spectator. 'He,' speaking of the Divine Child, 'is lying in simple nakedness on a rich red carpet, and is supported by a white pillar, over which the carpet passes. Of these accessories every thread is most delicately and carefully painted; no slovenly washes of meretricious colour where He is to be served, before whom all things are open; no perfunctory sparing of toil in serving Him who has given us all that is best. On his right hand kneels the Virgin Mother in adoration, her very face a magnificat—praise, ...
— The Old Masters and Their Pictures - For the Use of Schools and Learners in Art • Sarah Tytler
... of the writing in periodicals falls far short of the standards of excellence established by the best authors. Because he finds that the average uncritical reader not only accepts commonplace work but is apparently attracted by meretricious devices in writing, he may conclude that high literary standards are not essential to popular success. The temptation undoubtedly is great both for editors and writers to supply articles that are no better than the average reader demands, especially in such ephemeral publications ...
— How To Write Special Feature Articles • Willard Grosvenor Bleyer
... should urge to their sons the necessity of keeping aloof from the allurements of the theatre. If at that time the costume of the stage differed essentially from that of private life, and was the reverse of modest, or if the actresses indulged in meretricious airs which dared not be shown in domestic society, there was a very just pretence, or rather indeed there was the most cogent reason for preaching against the theatre. But at this day, no hypothesis of the kind can be allowed. That beautiful young women ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Volume I, Number 1 • Stephen Cullen Carpenter
... merriment very unusual to him. The champ and gallop of the horses, and Clymer's vociferous enjoyment of his own wit, blended with it; and for a moment or two Hyde was under a physical exhilaration as intoxicating as the foam of the champagne they had been drinking. In the height of this meretricious gaiety, a carriage, driving at a rather rapid rate turned into the road; and Cornelia suddenly raised her eyes to the festive young men, and then dropped them with ...
— The Maid of Maiden Lane • Amelia E. Barr
... last acts of the Ministry in retiring in 1861, was the signing of the contract to rebuild Spencer Wood. The appropriation was a very niggardly one, in view of the size of the structure required as a vice- regal residence. All meretricious ornaments in the design were of course left out. A square building, two hundred feet by fifty, was erected with the main entrance, in rear, on the site of the former lovely flower garden. The location of the entrance and consequent sacrifice ...
— Picturesque Quebec • James MacPherson Le Moine
... first debate of the Lincoln-Douglas series, an admirer of the former, having no doubt now "the stump speaker" would defeat the meretricious ...
— The Lincoln Story Book • Henry L. Williams
... because the latter has missed the one little point which is the basis of the deduction. The same may be said, my dear fellow, for the effect of some of these little sketches of yours, which is entirely meretricious, depending as it does upon your retaining in your own hands some factors in the problem which are never imparted to the reader. Now, at present I am in the position of these same readers, for I hold in this ...
— Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... of shingles and adorned with a series of very quaint and vivid little paintings of the "Dance of Death," quite in the Holbein manner; the new sends up a painful glare from its white limestone, and is ornamented with candelabra in a meretricious imitation of platinum. As an almost professional cherisher of the quaint I ought to have chosen to return at least by the dark and narrow way; but mark how luxury unmans us. I was already demoralised. I crossed the threshold of the timbered portal, took a few steps, and retreated. It ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... unadorned, straightforward, and elegant, every ornament being stripped off as it were a garment. While he desired to give others the material out of which to create a history; he may perhaps have done a kindness to conceited writers who wish to trick them out with meretricious graces; [26] but he has deterred all men of sound taste from touching them. For in history a pure and brilliant conciseness of style is the highest attainable beauty." Condensed as they are, and often almost bald, they have that matchless ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
... prejudices of the English gentleman, that truly national ideal of character. . . . A love of order, seemliness, and good taste has led the Anglican Church along a middle path between what a seventeenth century divine called 'the meretricious gaudiness of the Church of Rome and the squalid ...
— Painted Windows - Studies in Religious Personality • Harold Begbie
... she sighed by way of comment, and mused deeply for a moment before she turned her face to me, as to something forgotten and remembered, and assumed the half-hearted meretricious smile. ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... the fashionable world was undisputed. No doubt the Scottish painter would be attracted by the technical accomplishment of Lawrence's work; but he was between fifty and sixty years of age and little likely to be influenced by an art, which, for all its brilliance, was meretricious in many respects. Yet it is possible that the adulation lavished by society upon his contemporary's style may have induced him to consider if something of the elegance for which it was esteemed so highly could not be added with advantage to his own. On the other hand, Scottish ...
— Raeburn • James L. Caw
... alone, more incensed than ever against the object of their invectives, whom he now considered in the light of an adventurer, concealing his poverty, and perhaps his crimes beneath a garb of lies. That such a character, by means of a fine person and a few meretricious talents, could work himself into the confidence of Mary Beaufort, pierced her cousin to the soul; and as he mounted the stairs with an intent to seek her in her dressing-room, he almost resolved to refuse ...
— Thaddeus of Warsaw • Jane Porter
... of our morning service, how beautiful, how apposite, how intelligible they were, when read with simple and distinct decorum! But how much of the meaning of the words was lost when they were produced with all the meretricious charms ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... express his friendship. In fact, Palford's taste approved of his attitude. He was evidently much under the spell of the slight girl with the Manchester accent and sober blue eyes, but she was neither flighty nor meretricious, and would have sense enough to give no trouble even when he naturally forgot her in the revelations of his new life. Her father also was plainly a respectable working-man, with a blunt Lancashire pride which would keep him ...
— T. Tembarom • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... severe simplicity here," observed Patching, "No meretricious effects. Nothing but strokes of green paint, up and down, representing the density of an African jungle. Yet how admirably these seemingly careless strokes, laid on by the hand of genius, ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton
... return. My idyl was spoiled. Old-fashioned ideas emerged, and took form in the plain light of every-day common-sense. I knew the wonderfully gorgeous spectacle these two young people were going to see at the play that night, with its lights, its music, its splendidly meretricious Orientalism. And I knew Auriccio's,—not a disreputable place at all, perhaps; but free-and-easy, and distinctly Bohemian. I wished that this little girl, so arrogantly and ignorantly disdainful (as Alice would have been under the same ...
— Aladdin & Co. - A Romance of Yankee Magic • Herbert Quick
... the weeds of woe, And vague, so far, is the tale I tell; But bear with me for the briefest spell, And surely shall ye know Of the land of Gosh, and Tush, and Splosh, And Stodge, the Swank, the foolish Swank, The mulish Swank of Gosh- The meretricious, avaricious, ...
— The Glugs of Gosh • C. J. Dennis
... The city! what is it but a vast amphitheatre, filled with racers, with charioteers, with eager competitors; surrounded by an unseen and awful array of witnesses? And here, daily, the lists are opened, and men contend for success, for station, for power. But these are meretricious and perishable awards. The real prize is a spiritual gain, a crown that "fadeth not away." And, if we comprehend the great purpose of existence at all—if we look with any eagerness to its intrinsic issues and its final result; we shall heed that decree of Divine Wisdom ...
— Humanity in the City • E. H. Chapin
... of workmen's dwellings. The road from Surbiton and Epsom ran under the arch, and, like a bright fungoid growth in the ditch, there was now appearing a sort of fourth estate of little red-and-white rough-cast villas, with meretricious gables and very brassy window-blinds. Behind the Avenue was a little hill, and an iron-fenced path went over the crest of this to a stile under an elm-tree, and forked there, with one branch going back into ...
— Ann Veronica • H. G. Wells
... the meanest of mankind, but in our century he has been transmuted into a kind of hero. The theory is of German origin; but it was presented to the English public by De Quincey, who adorned it with all the persuasiveness of his meretricious genius. ...
— The Trial and Death of Jesus Christ - A Devotional History of our Lord's Passion • James Stalker
... or the ribaldry of the frontier, they must have been startled at the earnest and sincere purity of his utterances. It was marvellous to see how this untutored man, by mere self-discipline and the chastening of his own spirit, had outgrown all meretricious arts, and found his own way to the grandeur and strength of ...
— The Papers And Writings Of Abraham Lincoln, Complete - Constitutional Edition • Abraham Lincoln
... those immediately cognizant of his efforts could conceive his herculean labours to promote the repeal of the corn laws. His eloquence was characterised by intelligence, directness, the absence of all meretricious ornament, and an eagerness to convince and carry his hearers with him, which was singularly effective. His addresses were not only free from all ambition as to ornate or attractive language, but also as to original or ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... shoulders, tiny lace tuckers were inserted, and gorgeous jewellery was simulated by wretched bits of tinsel trimming. The realism of the Stuart stump picture was never so atrocious as this baleful invention, which was as meretricious as a ...
— Chats on Old Lace and Needlework • Emily Leigh Lowes
... to satisfy myself that I had not been imposed upon by meretricious counterfeits, I emerged with a beaming and joyful countenance, stowing the needful away carefully in an interior pocket, and, on descending the bank step, was accosted by a polite, agreeable stranger, who, begging my pardon with profusion, inquired whether he had not had the honour ...
— Baboo Jabberjee, B.A. • F. Anstey
... only for necessity? No, but they remain still as a very affront to marriage. The haunting of those dissolute places, or resort to courtesans, are no more punished in married men than in bachelors. And the depraved custom of change, and the delight in meretricious embracements, (where sin is turned into art,) maketh marriage a dull thing, and a kind of imposition or tax. They hear you defend these things, as done to avoid greater evils; as advoutries, deflowering of virgins, unnatural lust, and the like. But they say this is a preposterous ...
— The New Atlantis • Francis Bacon
... wont, to show him that I had a mind to keep to my reformed creed; the more I saw of Popery the closer I clung to Protestantism; doubtless there were errors in every church, but I now perceived by contrast how severely pure was my own, compared with her whose painted and meretricious face had been unveiled for my admiration. I told him how we kept fewer forms between us and God; retaining, indeed, no more than, perhaps, the nature of mankind in the mass rendered necessary for due observance. I told him I could not ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... the opinions of numerous musicians in support of their own. But the valorous editor "ventures to assure the distinguished critics and the publishers that there will be no difficulty in pointing out a hundred palpable faults, and an infinitude of meretricious uglinesses, such as, to real taste and judgment, are intolerable." Three more letters appeared in the following numbers—two for (Amateur and Professor) and one against (Inquirer) Chopin; the editor continuing to insist with as much violence as stupidity that ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... the Antistrophe, he laughs to scorn. The harp of Homer, the trump of Pindar and of Alcaeus are still. The decencies of costume, the decorations of vanity are stripped off without mercy as barbarous, idle, and Gothic. The jewels in the crisped hair, the diadem on the polished brow are thought meretricious, theatrical, vulgar; and nothing contents his fastidious taste beyond a simple garland of flowers. Neither does he avail himself of the advantages which nature or accident holds out to him. He chooses ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... presented us with a regular scolding-match between the rivals, in which they come sweeping up to each other from opposite sides of the stage, with their respective trains, like two pea-hens in a passion. Shakspeare would no more have brought his captivating, brilliant, but meretricious Cleopatra into immediate comparison with the noble and chaste simplicity of Octavia, than a connoisseur in art would have placed Canova's Dansatrice, beautiful as it is, beside the Athenian Melpomene, or the ...
— Characteristics of Women - Moral, Poetical, and Historical • Anna Jameson
... there are here touches of execrable taste, such as the punning trick with man and manners, suggesting a false antithesis; or the opposition of the words deprave and deprive; but we have in them only an instance of how the meretricious may co-exist with the lovely. The passage is fine and powerful, notwithstanding its ...
— England's Antiphon • George MacDonald
... hands clinched, tied and manacled behind him, looked like formidable hammers capable of striking a man down dead at one blow; his whole aspect was repulsive and terrible—there was no redeeming point about him—for even the apparent fortitude he assumed was mere bravado—meretricious courage—which the first week of the galleys would crush out of him as easily as one crushes the juice out of a ripe grape. He wore a nondescript costume of vari-colored linen, arranged in folds that ...
— Vendetta - A Story of One Forgotten • Marie Corelli
... and magnificence. She saw herself putting the boy to bed by the light of a single candle on the deserted top floor of a "business house," dark under the roof and scintillating exceedingly with lights and cut glass at the level of the street like a fairy palace. That meretricious splendour was the only one to be met in Mrs Verloc's visions. She remembered brushing the boy's hair and tying his pinafores—herself in a pinafore still; the consolations administered to a small and badly ...
— The Secret Agent - A Simple Tale • Joseph Conrad
... is a room in the Palazzo Arconati, on the Grand Canal, Venice. The room itself is beautiful in its decayed grandeur, but the furnishings and hangings are either tawdry and meretricious or avowedly modern. The three windows at the back open on to a narrow covered balcony, or loggia, and through them can be seen the west side of the canal. Between recessed double doors on either side of the room is ...
— The Notorious Mrs. Ebbsmith • Arthur Wing Pinero
... counsels and symposiacs Of dreamers who have pity for the backs That bear and bleed. All things are theirs: tracks, wires, streets and coal, The church's creed, The city's soul, The city's sea girt loveliness, The merciless and meretricious press. ...
— Toward the Gulf • Edgar Lee Masters
... being, who rode in a chariot, after the rest of the company. The young man did as he was directed; and saw a company of all ages, sexes, and ranks, on horse and on foot, some joyful and others sad, pass along; among whom he distinguished a woman in a meretricious dress, who, from the tenuity of her garments, seemed almost naked. She rode on a mule; her long hair, which flowed over her shoulders, was bound with a golden fillet; and in her hand was a golden rod, with ...
— Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, Vol. II (of 3) • Walter Scott
... that thou went wofully ignorant of logic. The fineness of thy taste has been exaggerated; thou wert unacquainted with the nobleness of simplicity; thy idea of a whole was grotesque and overloaded, and thy fancy in details was gaudy and meretricious. But thou hadst thy hand constantly in the public purse, and thou hadst plans and advisers forever before thee; more than all, thou didst find the houses in that neighbourbood wherein thou didst build, so preternaturally hideous that thou didst ...
— Paul Clifford, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... tragedy of "Romeo and Juliet." Charlotte Cushman was now at the summit of her art. She was universally allowed to be the greatest tragedienne of the day. And this recognition was due to her fine genius. She owed nothing to artifice or meretricious attraction. Nothing was left to chance, for the indomitable spirit and zealousness with which she had sustained herself under adverse circumstances had done not a little to elevate her in the regard of her countrymen and admirers. This was the first of ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 23, October, 1891 • Various
... unhappily almost wholly destroyed by fire, only the sacristy and the Brancacci Chapel escaping. Famous now because there Fra Lippo Lippi lived, and there Masolino and Masaccio painted, it is in itself one of the most meretricious and worthless buildings of the eighteenth century, full of every sort of flamboyant ornament and insincere, uncalled-for decoration; and yet, in spite of every vulgarity, how spacious it is, as though ...
— Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa • Edward Hutton
... poetry—merely meretricious glitter; there is no heart in it. That a man should like to have a nice mistress, a girl he is really fond of, is simple enough, but lamentation over the limbo of unborn loveliness is, ...
— Mike Fletcher - A Novel • George (George Augustus) Moore
... those which mark and adorn the literature of many other countries, the euphonisms of a meretricious court, or the rhymed musings of philosophers, or conceits from Pagan mythology, or the glancing epigrams of men of wit and of the world, or mere hunting choruses and Bacchanalian catches of a rude squirearchy. They are the ballads, songs, and tunes of the people. In their own language, ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... requires no careful choice of position so as to give a limb more prominence, or render the light more effective (the light just there is bad, though it is near a window). The sculptor did not rely upon 'artistic' and selected attitudes—something made up for the occasion. No meretricious aid whatever has been called in—no trick, no illusion of the eye, nothing theatrical. He relied solely and simply upon a true representation of the human body—the torso, the body itself—as he really saw it in life. When ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies
... never reconcile me to his strange anomalies in composition, and his sins against good taste and propriety. One wishes that he had allayed the heat of his fancy with some cooling drops of discretion. Even his colouring so admired in general, has something florid and meretricious to ...
— The Diary of an Ennuyee • Anna Brownell Jameson
... half way between private notes and formal history. Cicero says that while their author "desired to give others the material out of which to create a history, he may perhaps have done a kindness to conceited writers who wish to trick them out with meretricious graces" (to "crimp with curling-irons"), "but he has deterred all men of sound taste from ever touching them. For in history a pure and brilliant conciseness of style is the highest attainable beauty." "They are worthy of all praise, for they are simple, straightforward and elegant, ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... the period of the classical mania, is too small for its present surroundings, since the removal of the Palace. The north wing, visible to your right, is purely modern, of the age of the First and Second Empire and the Third Republic. The meretricious character of the reliefs in its extreme west portion, erected under the Emperor Napoleon III., and restored after the Commune, is redolent of the spirit of that gaudy period. The south wing, to your left, forms part of the connecting gallery ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 3 • Various
... itself piecemeal. It seems to me to be so constituted as to require to be read "off the reel." As a book in two volumes I think it would have good claims to success, and good chances of obtaining success. But I suppose the polishing I have hinted at (not a meretricious adornment, but positively necessary to good work and good art) to have ...
— The Letters of Charles Dickens - Vol. 2 (of 3), 1857-1870 • Charles Dickens
... forms of cloth binding should have a word of praise, but the many more which we see of gaudy, fantastic, and meretricious bindings, and frightful combinations of colors must ...
— A Book for All Readers • Ainsworth Rand Spofford
... done with women," said the poet with cold sternness. "I have done with the cold-hearted, treacherous, meretricious women of the town. But the simple, trusting and trustworthy country girl, the daughter of the soil, in perpetual touch with nature—surely communion with ...
— Happy Pollyooly - The Rich Little Poor Girl • Edgar Jepson
... whole. Tasty is an inferior word, used colloquially in a similar sense. Chaste (primarily pure), denotes in literature and art that which is true to the higher and finer feelings and free from all excess or meretricious ornament. Dainty and delicate refer to the lighter and finer elements of taste and beauty, dainty tending in personal use to an excessive scrupulousness which is more fully expressed by fastidious. Nice and delicate both refer to exact adaptation ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... of all the building, the south transept, or Blandamer aisle, is constantly in clear daylight. Moreover, while the nave is of the Norman style, and the transepts and choir of the Early English, this window is of the latest Perpendicular, complicated in its scheme, and meretricious in the elaboration of its detail. The difference is so great as to force itself upon the attention even of those entirely unacquainted with architecture, and it has naturally more significance for the professional eye. Westray stood ...
— The Nebuly Coat • John Meade Falkner
... fellow-historians, who have strangely disguised and distorted the facts respecting this country, and particularly respecting the great province of New Netherlands, as will be perceived by any who will take the trouble to compare their romantic effusions, tricked out in the meretricious gauds of fable, with ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving
... and then youth had its way—she could not always resist the present pleasure. And it was amusing, too, to be "talked about" with Peter Van Degen, who was noted for not caring for "nice women." She enjoyed the thought of triumphing over meretricious charms: it ennobled her in her own eyes to influence ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton
... swimming orb, and when to raise, Disclosing all the artificial blaze Of unfelt passion, which alone can move Him, whom the genuine eloquence of love Affected never, won with wanton wiles, With soulless sighs and meretricious smiles, By nature unimpress'd, uncharm'd by thee. Sweet goddess of ...
— Poetic Sketches • Thomas Gent
... gentleman complained mildly about these familiarities, at last, and when he got through with his statement he said that such a dog as that was not a proper animal to admit to bed with tired men, because he was "so meretricious in his movements and so organic in his emotions." We turned ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... whom he had said "D—n you, you cowardly rascal, and all your d——d breed," was no other than that very duke who has since cut so conspicuous a figure in the annals of gallantry with Mrs. CLARK, of meretricious notoriety, or in other words the duke of York himself. By means which shall hereafter be related, the interest of the royal family had been engaged for Hodgkinson, and even the first personage of it had agreed to do him a signal favour, ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor, Vol. I, No. 6, June 1810 • Various
... intermittent business in the gilding of small idols, to be shipped overseas and traded as objects of worship among the negroes of the American plantations. Jewellery, however, was his stand-by. In the manufacture of meretricious ware he had a plausibility amounting to genius, in the disposing of it a talent for hard bargains; and the two together had landed him in affluence. Well, sir, being headed off my boyhood's dream by the geographical inconvenience of Warwickshire—for a lad may run ...
— Sir John Constantine • Prosper Paleologus Constantine
... Eugene, more and more in love. He looked round him at the room; there was an ostentatious character about the luxury, a meretricious taste in ...
— Father Goriot • Honore de Balzac
... the part of those who oppose the bill, on the subject of its injustice to the white inhabitants of the District of Columbia. Indeed, the argument on that side of the question is, when divested of all that is immaterial, meretricious, and extravagant, reduced almost entirely to that single position. Abstract this from the excited declamation to which you have listened, and what is left is but the old revolting argument in favor of slavery, and a selfish appeal to prejudice and ignorance. ...
— History of the Thirty-Ninth Congress of the United States • Wiliam H. Barnes
... would be heightened by the character of the, locality where the gloomy show was to be presented. The great square of Brussels had always a striking and theatrical aspect. Its architectural effects, suggesting in some degree the meretricious union between Oriental and a corrupt Grecian art, accomplished in the medieval midnight, have amazed the eyes of many generations. The splendid Hotel de Ville, with its daring spire and elaborate front, ornamented one side of the place; directly opposite was the graceful but incoherent ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... past life—that she was a slave in Athens who saved her people by singing to the Tyrant; and Ian had made her sing to him, in a voice quite in keeping with her personality, delicate and fine and wonderfully high in its range, bird-like in its quality, with trills like a lark—a little meretricious but captivating. He had also written for her two verses which were as sharp and clear in her mind as the letter he wrote when she had ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... smiles, I your contempt, because my hair is close-cropped, and my expression stern and masculine. Yet if you will give me a fair hearing, I fear her not; for justice is on my side. Nay, it is with these same meretricious attractions of hers that my accusation is concerned: it was by her specious appearance that she beguiled the virtuous Dionysius, my lover, and drew him to herself. The present case is in fact closely allied with that of Drink and the Academy, with which ...
— Works, V3 • Lucian of Samosata
... sick of the languid manner of their contemporaries ruggedness seemed a venial fault, or rather a positive merit. In their hatred of meretricious ornament, and of what Cowper calls "creamy smoothness," they erred on the opposite side. Their style was too austere, their versification too harsh. It is not easy, however, to overrate the service which they rendered to literature. The intrinsic value of their poems is considerable. But ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... rare comfort to the Eubanks ladies that Eustace was a bass instead of a tenor. They had observed that most tenor songs are of a suggestive and meretricious character. Arthur Updyke, for example, who clerked in the city drug store, was a tenor, and nearly all of his songs were distressingly sentimental; indeed, fairly indelicate at times in their lack of reserve about kisses and embraces and sighs and ecstasies. Glad indeed were the guardians of Eustace ...
— The Boss of Little Arcady • Harry Leon Wilson
... the old walls and the flower-boxes which were outside nearly all the windows, and did not talk any nonsense about them; even the creepers seemed to be greener than usual in the sunlight of the afternoon. In the chapel somebody was playing the organ, which may have been a meretricious effect, but it pleased Nina, and that was all I cared about. The whole college was most wonderfully peaceful, no one could imagine that the quadrangle had ever been made hideous by Bacchanalian yells. And I felt proud of ...
— Godfrey Marten, Undergraduate • Charles Turley
... and up the gloomy, narrow streets that lead to Montmartre. They visit the Moulin Rouge and the Bal Tabarin, and they see the Oriental Dances and the Cafe of Hell and the hundred and one other glittering fakes and false appearances that poor old meretricious Paris works overtime to prepare for such people as themselves. And the Lady from Georgia, having seen it all, thanks Heaven that she at least is pure—which is a beginning—and they go home more enthusiastic than ever in ...
— Behind the Beyond - and Other Contributions to Human Knowledge • Stephen Leacock
... to hooliganism. Not having learnt to appreciate either literature or art, they either read nothing or read stories that are neither true nor decent. They respond only to what is highly spiced and have nothing in their minds to counter balance the meretricious attractions of suggestive stories and undesirable films. The truth about the people who are fond of "blue" stories is often (though not always) that those stories accurately indicate their intellectual level. And the uneducated ...
— Men, Women, and God • A. Herbert Gray
... when—she and it were young. Or rather for these thirty years has moralizing told, How this good deed and that she'll do, before she grows old: Four-and-twenty sighs a-day, that our rude English sky Is not precise as she—and may wash off the dye Meretricious of her cheeks, which are then like gold, (Though less tempting;) sweet and yellow as a marigold![2] Four-and-twenty wailings o'er the wedded state, Yet twice as many every day 'tis not her fate; Pretending to the world 'tis mere choice that has led To singleness—yet ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, No. - 287, December 15, 1827 • Various
... individual—Julio the Second only excepted; and in him he represented the reigning passion rather than the man. In painting, he contented himself with a negative colour, and as the painter of mankind, rejected all meretricious ornament. The fabric of St Peter's scattered into infinity of jarring parts by Bramante and his successors, he concentrated; suspended the cupola, and to the most complex, gave the air of the most simple ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 54, No. 338, December 1843 • Various
... received from Queen Anne a pension of L200 a year for his life. To the last royal favour was extended to him, and he was selected to superintend the decorations of Blenheim. But death intervened. The over-rated, overpaid, and most meretricious painter died at Hampton Court in 1707. There is evident error in Dominici's statement that the old man met his death from drowning on a visit to Languedoc. Walpole, summing up his merits and demerits, says, rather curiously, 'He was an excellent painter for the sort of ...
— Art in England - Notes and Studies • Dutton Cook
... rage. Her face is convulsed. Her eyes are burning coals. She has never been so nearly a great actress, this meretricious little dancer and comedian, as in this moment when she forgets ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... Paris for the sake of a breath of fresh air. At the top of the steps she paused and filled her lungs. It was a still, moonless night, and the stars hung low down, like diamonds on a canopy of black velvet. They made the flaring lights of the terrace of the Hotel and Cafe de Paris look tawdry and meretricious. ...
— Septimus • William J. Locke
... tolerated only for necessity; no, but they remain still as a very affront to marriage. The haunting of those dissolute places, or resort to courtezans, are no more punished in married men than in bachelors. And the depraved custom of change, and the delight in meretricious embracements (where sin is turned into art), maketh marriage a dull thing, and a kind of imposition or tax. They hear you defend these things, as done to avoid greater evils; as advoutries, deflowering of virgins, unnatural lust, and ...
— Ideal Commonwealths • Various
... it was really good," said May, lifting her golden head in deprecation of a possibly misguided admiration. "It is so beautiful that I'm dreadfully afraid it is meretricious." ...
— A Venetian June • Anna Fuller
... dress coat would have transfixed the assembly like some blood-curdling ghost. The ladies would have huddled together in a circle round the wearer and gazed at him open-mouthed. He would subsequently have had to pay for the ball's liquid refreshment. The Bal Jasmin did not employ meretricious ornament to attract custom. A low gallery containing tables ran around the bare hall, the balustrade being of convenient elbow height from the floor, so that the dancers during intervals of rest could lounge and talk with the drinkers. In the middle was a circular bandstand where greasy musicians ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke
... the cooking pot; the whitewashing, as I believe it is termed with us, also shows, only it is not the debtor who is whitewashed, but the creditors doing themselves over with white clay to celebrate the removal of their enemy from his sphere of meretricious activity. This inversion may arise from the fact that whitewashing a creditor who was about to be cooked would be unwise, as the stuff would boil off the bits and spoil the gravy. There is always some fragment of sound sense underlying African institutions. Kiva was, when I got out, tied up, ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... low-swung above the city, had helped him to piece together many a detail of decoration and furnishing, alike somber and richly dignified. Kirkwood told himself that the owner, whoever he might be, was a man of wealth and taste inherited from another age; he had found little of meretricious to-day in the dwelling, much that was solid and sedate and homely, and—Victorian.... He could have wished for more; a box of early Victorian vestas ...
— The Black Bag • Louis Joseph Vance
... to the church, a perpendicular building with a decidedly 'Early English' smell in it, and Uncle Solomon led the way to his pew, stopping to nudge Mark as they passed the memorial to his enemy's meretricious aunt; he nudged him again presently, after he had retired behind the ecclesiastical hat and emerged again to deal out some very large prayer and hymn books as if they ...
— The Giant's Robe • F. Anstey
... Benjamin Constant's blue ceiling, meretricious and still adorable, expressive of the delicious decadence of Paris, and my eyes moistened because the world is so beautiful ...
— Sacred And Profane Love • E. Arnold Bennett
... It is so absurd for the old man to have left instructions for all this meretricious romance to surround his end. As for old Girtle, he seems to delight in it, and goes about the house rubbing his hands ...
— The Dark House - A Knot Unravelled • George Manville Fenn |
